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Whether notifications are appropriate depends on the signal to noise ratio of the channel. Twitter, email, facebook, and any general purpose communication channel are all poor candidates for having notifications turned on, because most of the messages are either not relevant or do not require immediate action. It’s better to check in on these when you’re not doing something else or want to take a break from the “real work” you’re doing or “real life” you’re living.

First: a story. Alice and Bob are sent to an earth-like planet and given the task of finding its highest point. Unfortunately, they are initially given only stone-age era technology to work with. The planet is foggy and visibility is only 20 feet or so. Alice and Bob adopt different approaches:

Programming is all about managing complexity. Without good tools to manage it, the complexity of programs becomes mentally intractable for our limited brains and we’d lose control and understanding of our programs (imagine writing a big software system entirely in assembly language).

I’d like to learn more about people’s experiences building larger backend software systems (say > 5 nodes), either atop some public cloud (like AWS, Google, or Azure) or atop private cloud infrastructure. Having done work myself in these areas, I know that it can sometimes be painful and/or complicated, and there are lots of different technologies aimed at making it easier.